Thursday, 5 February 2009

Dishing It Out…

Health Minister Ann Keen - who has raked in £660,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses since 2001 - was taken to court over claims she snubbed a war veteran's pleas for help.

She was ordered to pay £15,000 in damages to 84-year-old John Taylor, who was badly wounded while fighting in Holland during the Second World War.

Good for him! But like all money-grubbing parasites, she’s fighting like a polecat to hang on to her wodge:

Legal experts said it was the first known case of an MP facing action for breaching their 'duty of care' to a constituent. Mrs Keen was told to pay the sum by Brentford County Court in December after she failed to contest the case within the six-week time limit. But she won a stay of execution when the court withdrew its judgment and asked Mr Taylor to prove the minister had wronged him under the law.

He then launched the unprecedented legal bid after becoming angry that the MP had apparently failed to respond to 100 letters begging for assistance to secure compensation, after he was wrongly jailed for stealing £17 in 1962.

No doubt she (and her enablers in government) dismissed him as a nuisance, one of the ‘green ink’ brigade.

Well, maybe. But she should remember the defining factor about people like this – their dogged persistence!

Mrs Keen denies the allegations, saying she 'repeatedly made representations' on behalf of the ex-soldier.

But the allegations will fuel constituents' disquiet over her performance in the marginal London seat, which she holds by 4,411 votes.

The Brentford and Isleworth MP came under fire last year when she and her MP husband were dubbed 'Mr and Mrs Expenses' after using £175,000 of public money to help buy a flat near Parliament, despite owning a constituency home only nine miles away.

Keeping it in the family…

Mr Taylor, of Hounslow, West London, said: 'I haven't asked for the Earth. I just want some assistance from my elected representative. But she is a disastrous and lazy politician who has failed to carry out her job.'

Mr Taylor spent three years in jail after three men brought a stolen safe to the flat where he was sleeping. His conviction was quashed in 1998.

He says he asked Mrs Keen to help him claim compensation for his ordeal, but beyond writing to then Justice Minister Baroness Scotland four years ago, he says she has failed to help.

And that failure looks set to cost him dear…

A source close to the MP said yesterday: 'Ann Keen has done all she could for Mr Taylor. She tried to help at the start and has been sending acknowledgments. As recently as June last year, she told Mr Taylor that his solicitors should contact her if there was any useful action she could take. Now she has drawn a line under it and said she can do no more.'

The court will draw the line, sweetie. Not you.

I suspect he won’t get very far with his case, but I hope it puts the fear of god into all MPs, of every party…